Hi, I’m Professor Dresden. I’ve been teaching at W&L for over 20 years, and I’ve taught everything from calculus to cryptography to continued fractions. I do summer research with students, occasionally teach an actuary class, and when I’m not in the office I can sometimes be found at the swimming pool with my two children. Before W&L, I spent many years in school, at Stanford, Wisconsin, and Texas. My curriculum vitae has more detailed information about my academic and professional activities.

Office Hours (Winter Term, 2017-18).

Mondays at 1:30,

Wednesdays at 1:30,

Fridays at 12:15 AND at 1:30.

Favorite classes.

It’s hard to choose! I had a tremendous amount of fun last year with my Math 332 class (Ordinary Differential Equations). We took some rather simple differential equations and created lovely stream plots that depict the behavior of the solution over time, given a certain initial condition. Here are two pictures from computer labs we did in class. The first one is a regular stream plot …

… and this second one is the same plot, but run through a filter to create a lovely effect.

Oh, and despite the occasional use of computers, my teaching is actually pretty old-school. I mainly use the chalkboard, which leads to some wonderful (hand-drawn) mathematical displays. My students saw a lot of this in last year’s Real Analysis class (Math 311-312), where I gave detailed presentations like this one on the implicit function theorem:

and this one on uniform convergence:

… but don’t worry, that’s just what the chalkboard looks like at the end of class.

Likewise, visit the AMS (American Mathematical Society) and their student page. Note that the AMS and the MAA have a great deal of overlap in terms of services and membership. but the AMS is a bit more research-oriented and the MAA is a bit more teaching-oriented.

The incredibly useful Rosetta Code site has code snippets in Mathematica and Maple (and more).

And here’s a bit more. The cause that is nearest and dearest to my heart is organ donation. I have some links on my advice page (scroll to the bottom), or you can go directly to kidney.org, to bethematch.org, and to organdonor.gov. You can save someone’s life.